SCI: ETF Early Operations - PSC

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The Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), or TeraGrid, involves nine resource providers operating high-performance computing, information, and visualization facilities, interconnected by a dedicated optical network and integrated with a set of common software that presents the user community with a cohesive set of resources and services. On October 1, 2004, the ETF will conclude a three-year construction effort to create this distributed environment and will transition into an operational state. This proposal outlines a set of services to be provided at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center as part of the TeraGrid system. PSC will enable leading-edge scientific inquiry by providing and operating an integrated resources environment to TeraGrid users. It comprises capability-computing platforms supported by tightly coupled, high-performance storage, visualization, and networking systems. PSC personnel will work directly with selected users to improve the performance of their applications on the TG systems, emphasizing scaling to large processor counts. Under a separate proposal, PSC will acquire, install, bring up, integrate, stabilize, assess and test on a representative set of initial applications, an early model (prototype) supercomputing system. Based on the Red Storm system now under construction by Cray, Inc. for the Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), it is designed to be a highly scalable capability system for very demanding, high-end computational scientific and engineering research applications. It will be interfaced to, and served by, the PSC file and network systems and will be a component of the TeraGrid. This proposal includes efforts required to integrate the significant new resource into the PSC and TG environment. The system will be sufficiently large to support a broad range of testing to establish its viability, at a larger scale, as a leadership-class resource for the open U.S. research community.